The Gospel of St. Matthew

Schmidt Number: S-2275

On-line since: 15th January, 2017

LECTURE FOUR

Berne,September 4, 1910

We have
seen that there is a significant difference between
knowledge of the spiritual world such as has existed
through all the ages and the particular form of knowledge
of the Divine-Spiritual to which the organic constitution
of the Hebrews enabled them to aspire. Through their
progenitor Abraham they had inherited a physical
constitution in which there had been implanted an organ
whereby, to, the extent possible through knowledge
transmitted by way of the senses, men were to be able to
have actual experience of the Divine-Spiritual, not
merely vague inklings. Knowledge of the Divine-Spiritual
has existed everywhere and at all times, but this
knowledge of the Eternal was attained in the Mysteries,
on the path of Initiation. A distinction must be made
between knowledge acquired as the result of individual
development through specially devised methods and
knowledge of the spiritual world that is normal in some
particular epoch and connected with the fulfilment of a
definite mission in the evolution of humanity.

In Atlantis
the normal form of knowledge was astral-clairvoyant
perception of the Divine-Spiritual. But in the times of
the ancient Hebrews the normal form of exoteric knowledge
of the spiritual world became dependent upon a particular
physical organ. It has already been said that in the
people of Abraham this knowledge arose in the form of a
feeling that the Divine was united with their inmost
being. It was therefore inner knowledge, a realisation of
the Divine in the deepest core of being that had been
made possible.

But this
inner realisation of the Divine-Spiritual did not
immediately enable a man to say: When I sink into my own
being, striving to fathom its depths, I find the drop of
the Divine Spirit that can give me knowledge of the
Divine-Spiritual by which the outer world too is
permeated. — This experience was not immediately
possible — not, indeed, until the appearance of
Christ in the evolution of humanity. The Hebrew people
could experience the Divine only through participating in
their Folk-Spirit. When a man felt himself to be a member
of his people as a whole, as distinct from a separate
individuality, when he felt that through his blood he
belonged to a sequence of generations — then he
became aware of the presence of the Divine; his
consciousness of Jahve lay in the Folk-consciousness, in
the very blood of his people. Hence in the
spiritual-scientific sense it is not correct to speak of
the God Jahve or Jehovah merely as the God of Abraham. He
is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob —
he is the Being who passes on from generation to
generation, manifesting himself in the Folk-consciousness
in and through individual men.

The great
advance of this form of knowledge to thc Christian form
lies in the fact that the latter recognises in each
single individual what ancient Hebrew knowledge could
reach only by contemplation of the Folk-Spirit, of the
Spirit flowing in the blood of the generations. Thus
Abraham might have said: According to the covenant that
has been made with me, I shall be the founder of a people
through my descendants; in the blood flowing down the
generations descending from me there will live the God we
venerate as the Highest, who reveals himself to us in our
Folk-consciousness. — This became the normal
experience of that time.

As already
said, at all times and through all the epochs there has
existed higher knowledge of the Divine-Spiritual. This
knowledge, acquired in the Mysteries, is not dependent
upon any of the other, special forms of cognition. In
ancient Atlantis every human being was endowed with a
certain astral-etheric clairvoyance enabling him to gaze
into the divine-spiritual ground of existence; by
developing his inner faculties he could then acquire
knowledge that was. available in the Mysteries or
Oracles. Also during the epoch when the spiritual
knowledge characteristic of the Hebrews was the normal
form, it was still possible in certain sanctuaries for
man to experience the Divine while out of the body but
not while in the body as in the case of the people of
Abraham; in the eternal part of his being a man could
rise to vision of the Divine-Spiritual.

You can
readily imagine that one thing was essential for Abraham.
He had experienced the Divine-Spiritual in his own
special way, through knowledge acquired by means of a
physical organ; this was how he had learnt to know the
supreme God. To become a living power in evolution,
however, it was infinitely important for him to know that
the God revealed in the Folk-consciousness of the Hebrew
people was identical with the God venerated in the
Mysteries of all ages as the creative Deity. It was
therefore necessary for Abraham to be able to identify
his God with the God revealed in the Mysteries, and that
was only possible upon one very definite premise. Upon
one very definite premise the certainty could be given
him that the powers manifesting themselves in thc
Folk-consciousness were identical with those ma.nifesting
in a higher form in the Mysteries. To understand what
this certainty implied, we must turn our minds to a fact
closely connected with the evolu-tion of humanity.

In the book
Occult Science you can read that in ancient
Atlantis there were Initiates known as “Priests of
the Oracles” — the actual names are not of
essential significance. One of these great Initiates was
the leader of all the Atlantean Oracles; he was the
Initiate of the Sun-Oracle, in contrast to the
subordinate Oracle-centres to which the Mercury-, Mars-,
Jupiter-, Initiates, and so forth, belonged. I have said
too that this great Initiate of the Sun-Oracle was also
the leader of the civilizing colony which, having moved
from the West across to the East, from Atlantis to the
interior of Asia, spread out from there to inaugurate
post-Atlantean culture and civilization. This mighty
Initiate — for such he was, already at that time
— withdrew to secret centres in the heart of Asia,
and made it possible for the wise men known as the holy
Rishis to become such illustrious Teachers of their
people. And it was he, this great and mysterious
Initiate, who conferred Initiation upon Zarathustra.

The
Initiation conferred upon Zarathustra was not the same as
that received by the Rishis, for their tasks were
different. Through their Initiation the Rishis were able,
when their inner faculties had further developed, to give
utterance as it were out of themselves to the great
secrets of existence. Thereby they became the illustrious
Teachers of pre-Vedic, ancient Indian culture. Though
their powers were awakened by means specially devised,
they were otherwise on a par with thc old Atlantean
clairvoyant faculties, but they were distributed among
the seven Rishis individually. Like the leaders of the
several Oracle-centres, each of the seven Rishis had his
own particular sphere and task. But a whole collegium
spoke when any onc of the seven voiced what he knew of
the primeval wisdom. The grcat Sun-Initiate who brought
the old Atlantean wisdom from the West across to the East
passed it on in a particular form to those who were to
become the bearers of post-Atlantean culture. He imparted
it to Zarathustra in a different form, enabling him to
speak in the way I have already indicated.

The Rishis
declared that in order to reach the highest realm of
divine-spiritual existence, everything in the surrounding
world, everything presented to the outer senses, must be
regarded as maya or illusion; man must turn away from
this outer world and sink into his inner being: then
there will dawn in him a world entirely different from
the one out-spread before him in everyday life. —
To ascend into the spheres of divine-spiritual existence
by turning away from the illusory world of maya, by
developing the inner life — such was the teaching
of the Rishis of ancient India.

In contrast
to this, Zarathustra did not teach men to turn away from
what is outwardly manifest. He did not say: everything
external is maya and we must turn away from it. He said :
this maya is the revelation, the actual garrnent of
divine-spiritual existence. We may not turn away from it
— on the contrary, it is our duty to fathom it. We
must conceive of the Sun's body of light as thc outer
texture in which Ahura Mazdao lives and weaves!

In a
certain sense, therefore, the gist of Zarathustra's
teaching was the opposite of that given by the ancient
Rishis. The essential significance of post-Indian
civilization lay in the fact that its task was to impress
upon the outer world the fruits of man's spiritual
activity. As we heard, Zarathustra transmitted to Hermes
and to Moses the greatest gifts that were his to bestow.
In order that the wisdom of Moses might become fruitful
in the right way and work as a seed, it had to take root
in the people who were the descendants of Abraham.
Abraham was the first into whom was implanted the organ
for acquiring consciousness of Jahve; but it was
essential for him to know that the God who could announce
his presence inwardly to physical faculties of cognition,
was speaking with the same voice as the eternal,
all-pervading God of the Mysteries, save that he was
revealing himself here in the form in which Abraham was
able to understand him. It is not possible for a Being of
such lofty rank as the great Atlantean Sun-Initiate to
speak without more ado in words that are intelligible to
those who live at some particular time and have a special
mission. An Individuality as exalted as the great
Sun-Initiate is one who leads an eternal existence, of
whom it was truly said — indicating the hallmark of
eternity — that he was without name or age,
‘without father, without mother, having neither
beginning of days nor end of life’. (Heb. VII, 3).
A figure of this eminence in the evolution of humanity is
only able to manifest by assuming a form whereby he can
establish relationship with those to whom he is to reveal
himself. Thus in order to impart the necessary
enlightenment to Abraham, the great Teacher of the Rishis
and of Zarathustra assumed a form in which he bore the
etheric body of Abraham's original forefather; it was the
etheric body of Shem, the son of Noah, and it
had been preserved as the etheric body of Zarathustra had
been preserved for Moses. The great Initiate of the
Sun-Mystery used the etheric body of Shem in order to
reveal himself to Abraham and be understood by him. This
meeting between Abraham and the great Sun-Initiate is
referred to in the Old Testament as the meeting of
Abraham with Melchisedek, or Malek-Zadek as it has become
customary to call him — the ‘king and priest
of the most high God’. (Gen. XIV, 18; Heb. V, 6, 1o
; VII, 1-3). It was a mecting of supreme, world-embracing
significance. In order that Abraham should not be utterly
dumbfounded, the great Sun-Initiate manifested himself in
the etheric body of Shem, the progenitor of the Semites.
And the Bible points, most significantly, to something
that is unfortunately all too little understood, namely,
to the source of that which Melchisedek was able to
impart to Abraham. What was this? He could impart the
mystery of Sun-existence which Abraham could naturally
only under-stand in his own way. The same mystery lay
behind the revelation that had been announced, as a
prophecy, by Zarathustra.

To his
chosen pupils Zarathustra spoke of Ahura Mazdao, the
spiritual Being behind the Sun's body of light, saying in
effect: Direct your gaze to a power that is behind the
Sun, that is not yet united with the Earth but will onc
day descend to the Earth and pour into Earth-evolution!
— Realising that Zarathustra could only make a
prophetic announcement that Christ, the Sun-Spirit, would
come in a human body, we shall be aware that even greater
profundities of the Sun-Mystery had to be revealed to
those who were to prepare for and subsequently be
instrumental in bringing about the incarnation of Christ
on the Earth. This deeper revelation was made possible
because, at the meeting referred to, the same Being who
had been Zarathustra's Teacher brought influence to bear
upon Abraham from the same source as that from which
Christ's influence was eventually to pour. This again is
indicated symbolically in the Bible where it is said that
Melchisedek, king of Salem, this ‘priest of the
most high God’, brought to Abraham bread and wine.
(Gen. XVI, 18). Bread and wine were dispensed on another,
later occasion — when for those who were believers
the Christ-Mystery was given expression in the
institution of Holy Communion. The emphasis laid upon the
similarity of the sacrificial acts points to the fact
that the source of the impulses given by Melchisedek and
by Christ was one and the same.

Thus
through Melchisedek an influence emanating from a Power
that would subsequently come down to the Earth was to be
brought to bear in advance upon Abraham, the great
preparer of the later event. As the result of this
meeting the realisation dawned upon Abraham that the
source of the power he felt within him and venerated
under the name of Jahve or Jehovah as the loftiest
reality of which he could conceive, was also the source
of the consciousness of the supreme, all-pervading
Godhead — consciousness such as was gained by
Initiates in the realm of earthly knowledge too. Abraham
was now able to carry this consciousness to a further
stage. — A new and different experience came to
him. He realised that in actual fact the blood flowing
through the generations of the Hebrew people was to
contain something only to be compared with what was
revealed in the Mysteries when clairvoyant vision was
directed to the secrets of cosmic existence and the
language of the Cosmos understood.

I have
already spoken of how, in the Mysteries, secrets of the
Cosmos were expressed in terms derived from the stars and
constellations. There were times when the teachers in the
Mysteries made use of words and images taken from the
courses of the stars and their mutual relationships. Such
images were a means of expressing what man experiences
spiritually when he attains consciousness of the
Divine-Spiritual.

What was it
that the Mystery-wisdom was able to read in this stellar
script? The secrets of the Godhead pervading the world!
The order of the stars was the visible expression of the
Godhead. Men turned their gaze to the heavens, saying:
There the Godhead reveals himself; the order and
harmonies of the stars are for us the manifestation of
the Divine. According to this view, therefore, the God of
all the worlds was made manifest in the order of the
stars.

Thus if the
same God were to be made manifest in a special way in the
mission of the Hebrew people, the manifestation must
necessarily be an expression of the same order as that
governing the courses of the stars in the Cosmos. Through
the blood of the generations as the outer instrument of
the Jahve-revelation, there must be expressed the same
order as that made manifest in the courses of the stars.
To put it differ-ently: in the sequence of the
generations, in the blood-kinship of Abraham's
descendants, there must be a mirror-image, a reflection,
of the stellar script in the heavens. Hence the promise
made to Abraham: The ordering of thy descendants shall be
that of the stars in heaven! (Genesis, XXIII, 17.) Such
is the correct version of the sentence that is usually
rendered to mean that the descendants would be as
numerous as the stars in heaven. — This implies
number only and is not the true meaning. The true meaning
is that the line of the descendants was to be in
accordance with an ordcr perceptible in the groupings of
the stars, which in turn arc an expression of the speech
of the Gods. Looking upwards, mcn beheld an order such as
is manifest in the Zodiac. The positions and
relation-ships of the planets in the Zodiac formed
constellations from which was drawn the language used to
proclaim the deeds of the Gods in the Universe. The firm
bond demonstrated in the Zodiac and in the relations of
the planets to the twelve constellations was to come to
expression in the blood-kinship of the descendants of
Abraham.

The twelve
sons of Jacob, also the twelve tribes of the Hebrew
people are therefore images of the twelve constellations
of the Zodiac. Just as the language of the Gods is
pressed in these twelve constellations, so does Jahve
manifest himself in the blood flowing through the
generations of the Hebrew people, divided into thc twelve
tribes descending from the twelve sons of Jacob.
Conditions established in the Zodiac are designated by
the name of the planet concerned — Venus, Mercury,
Sun, as the case may be. And we have heard how certain
parallelisms can be drawn between particular periods in
the historical life of the Hebrew people and the paths of
the planets through the Zodiac. Thus there is a
parallelism between the age of David, the royal minstrel,
and Hermes or Mercury; similarly, between the period of
the Babylonian captivity — when we see the forrn
taken by the Jalive-revela-tion six centuries before our
era as the result of a new impulse — and the planet
Venus.

It was to
be indicated to Abraham that there is a parallelism
between the place of a personality such as David in the
line of generations, and the position of Mercury in the
Zodiac. The tribe of Judah corresponds to the
constellation of Leo and the advent of David into that
tribe would correspond, in the history of the Hebrew
people, to the cosmic phenomenon of the occultation of
Leo by Mercury (Mercury in Leo). Such occultations are
indicated in many places: in the actual succession, in
the conferments of kingly or priestly offices, in the
battles or victories of one tribe or another, indeed in
the whole history of the Hebrews. All this was implicit
in the momentous words: Thy descendants shall be ordered
in accordance with the harmony of the stars in heaven.
— We must never accept the trivial interpretations
so often placed upon records founded on occultism but
realise their immense profundity.

Thus there
is actual evidence of order prevailing in the generations
enumerated in the Gospel of St. Matthew. This evangelist
has shown how the blood of the body that was to receive
the Zarathustra-Individuality was prepared in a very
special way to be instrumental in bringing about the
manifestation of Christ on the Earth.

What bad
been achieved through the forty-two generations from
Abraham to Joseph was that blood, blended in accordance
with the laws of the stars and of the holy Mysteries, had
finally been produced. In the composition of this blood
— which was needed by the Zarathustra-Individuality
for the fulfilment of his great mission — there was
inner order and harmony, reflecting one of the most
beautiful and significant principles manifest in the
heavenly constellations. The blood available for
Zarathustra was therefore an image of the Cosmos, having
been prepared through generations in accordance with
cosmic law. The basis of the record we now possess in a
modified form in the Gospel of St. Matthew is this
profound mystery of the evolution of a people as the
image of cosmic evolution.

Those who
were the first to know something of the sublime
Christ-Mystery felt that the very blood of Jesus of
Nazareth of whom the Gospel of St. Matthew tells was a
reflected image of the Cosmos, of the Spirit holding sway
in the Cosmos. And they expressed this secret by saying:
The Spirit of the whole Cosmos lived in the blood wherein
was to dwell the Ego who then became Jesus of Nazareth.
— This physical body must therefore have been an
imprint of the ruling Spirit of the Cosmos. Hence it was
said originally that the power underlying the composition
of the blood in the body of Zarathustra when incarnated
as Jesus of Nazareth, was the Spirit of our whole Cosmos,
the Spirit which, in the primal beginning, after the Sun
had separated from the Earth, brooded over and permeated
with warmth what had emerged into manifestation in the
course of the evolution of worlds. From the lectures
given in Munich to which reference has already been made,
we know that the sentence with which Genesis
begins — B'rescht bara elohim et haschamayim w'et
et ha'arets' — should not be translated into the
trivial words of modern language which no longer convey
the ancient meaning. Instead of ‘In the beginning
God created the heavens and the earth’, the
rendering should convey the following meaning: In what
has come over from Saturn, Sun and Moon, the Elohim
pondered, in cosmic soul-activity, the outwardly
manifesting and the inwardly active, throughout which
darkness prevailed; but there spread out and into this,
brooding over it, permeating it with warmth — as a
hen radiates warmth into the egg — the creative
Spirit of the Elohim, Ruach-Elohim. — This same
Spirit created the heavenly order that is expressed in a
certain way in the constellations of the stars. The
original Initiates of the Christ-Mystery felt that the
blend of blood in Jesus of Nazareth was an image of the
work accomplished by Ruach-Elohim throughout the Cosmos.
And of the blood that had been prepared in this way for
the great event, they said: it was ‘created by the
Spirit of the Universe, the spiritual Being called
“Ruach” in that significant passage in
Genesis beginning "B'reschit bara ...” ’. [
Note 01 ]

Such is the
sacred meaning, infinitely greater than any superficial
interpretation, of ‘the conception by the Holy
Spirit of the Universe’; it is also the basis of
the saying: ‘And she who gave birth to this Being
was filled with the power of the Spirit of the
Universe.’ — If we feel the sanctity of such
a Mystery we shall realise that in this way of presenting
it there is something infinitely higher than any of the
exoteric interpretations of the Virgin Birth.
Consideration of just two points in the Bible will enable
us to avoid trivial interpretations of this
‘immaculate conception’. The one point is
this: Why should the writer of St. Matthew's Gospel have
enumerated the whole sequence of generations from Abraham
to Joseph if he had wished to indicate that the birth of
Jesus of Nazareth had no connection with this line of
descent ? He is at pains to show how the blood was led
down the generations from Abraham to Joseph; how, then,
could he possibly have intended to indicate that the
blood of Jesus of Nazareth had nothing to do with this
blood? And the other point of which account must be taken
is that in the Hebrew language the gender of
‘Ruach-Elohim’ — rendered ‘Holy
Spirit' ’ the Bible — is feminine. — We
shall speak further of this. I only wanted now to call up
a feeling of the sublimity and grandeur of the thought
originally underlying this Mystery.

What took
place at the beginning of our era, known only to wise men
who were initiated into the secrets of cosmic existence,
was expressed in the Aramaic language in the original
record upon which the Gospel of St. Matthew is based. And
it is possible to prove, not only through occultism but
through actual philological investigation, that this
record was already in existence in the year 71 A.D. The
actual way in which the Gospels originated is set forth
in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact. [
Note 02 ] By proceeding with
exactitude, however, it is possible to show, even through
philology, that statements attributing a later date to
the Gospel of St. Matthew are not correct, for there is
evidence that an original Aramaic script of this Gospel
was already extant in the year 71 A.D. comparatively
short time, therefore, after the events in Palestine. But
as I am concerned here with facts of spiritual science,
not of philology, I will quote only one reference in
Talmudist literature, the authenticity of which is
accepted by Hebrew scholars.

There is a
passage in this literature to the effect that Rabbi
Gamaliel II was involved in a dispute with his sister
over the estate left by their father who had been killed
in a fight with the Romans in the year 7o. It is narrated
that Rabbi Gamaliel II appeared at the timc before a
judge who, according to the account, was a so-called
Jewish Christian. (Such men not uncommonly occupied
offices in the judiciary courts set up by the Romans for
the jews.) A strange incident occurred during the
proceedings. The dispute between the Rabbi and his sister
was over the inheritance of their father's estate. And
before a judge who certainly had some knowledge of
Christianity, Rabbi Gamaliel insisted that according to
Jewish Law it was only a son, not a daughter, who could
inherit, and that the estate therefore passed to him. The
judge replied that in the circle where he officiated, the
Thora had been set aside, and that as Gamaliel was
seeking justice and a verdict from him, he would not give
judgment in accordance with Jewish Law but with the Law
that had superseded the Thora. As already said, this
happened in the year 71 — the year after the death
of the father of the litigants during the persecution of
the Jews. Rabbi Gamaliel's only loophole now was to bribe
the judge. This he did, and the following day the judge
quoted from the original Aramaic script of St. Matthew's
Gospel, to the effect that ‘Christ did not come
into the world to destroy the Law of Moses but to fulfil
it’. The judge believed he could still his
conscience for deflecting the Law by maintaining that in
allotting the estate to Gamaliel his judgment was in
accordance with Christian tenets.

Here we
have evidence that in the year 71 A.D. there existed an
original Christian script from which words now contained
in the Gospel of St. Matthew were taken. The passage in
question was actually quoted in Aramaic and thus we have
external proof that this original text of St. Matthew's
Gospel, part of it at any rate, was then in existence. We
have yet to consider the findings of occult investigation
on the subject. The above episode has been quoted merely
in order to show that when the aid of external
scholarship is sought, it is not right to adopt the usual
procedure which is to collect all the literature
available for a.cademic study but leave out of account
the Talmudist writings which are exceedingly impor-tant
for knowledge even of the exoteric aspect of these
things.

Thus there
are very good grounds for affixing a comparatively early
date to the Gospel of St. Matthew. This alone provides
certain exoteric proof that the men who participated in
its compilation were living at no great distance of time
from the actual happenings in Palestine; the outer
circumstances in themselves, therefore, are evidence that
nobody could simply have lied to people, saying that
Christ Jesus did not live at the beginning of our era.
For as not even half a century had yet elapsed, it was a
mattcr of speaking to those who had been actual
eye-witnesses and therefore could not be persuaded that
certain events had never happened. Exoterically these
things are important and they are mentioned here merely
as evidence of that aspect of the subject.

We have
seen how measures founded on mysteries of cos-mic
existence were taken in the evolution of humanity in
order to prepare from the 'filtered' blood of the Hebrew
people — blood in which the order of the Cosmos
itself prevailed — a body in which the great
Initiate Zarathustra could reincarnate. For it is of the
Zarathustra-Individuality, of him and no other, that the
Gospel of Matthew speaks in the first place.

It must not
be imagined that everything brought to light here from
profound secrets of world-evolution took place quite
openly, before thc eyes of all men. Even for
contemporaries the events were veiled in deep mystery and
comprehensible only to a very few Initiates. Hence it is
understandable that such complete silence should have
been maintained concerning what came to pass at that time
as the greatest of all events in the evolution and
history of humanity. And when historians to-clay, basing
their views on the records available to them, point out
that no mention whatever is made of this event, we shall
not be at all surprised but on the contrary regard it as
a matter of course.

Having
characterized the part played by Zarathustra in the
preparation of this great event, we must now consider the
many other currents and influences at work immediately
before and also immediately after the coming of the
Christ, and all the happenings that took place around
Him. Prepara-tion for the event had been in process for a
long time. We have heard that preparation for the
development of the outer sheaths of Jesus of Nazareth had
been made by Hermes and Moses as the emissaries of
Zarathustra, and by Melchisedek, the bearer of the
Sun-Mystery, but there had also been preparation in a
different form, constituting as it were a sub-sidiary
stream. But subsidiary though it was, it nevertheless
played a part in the wider stream of happenings
originating with Zarathustra. This contributory stream
came slowly into existence in centres of which external
history informs us by calling attention to certain
religious sects where men, named by Philo the
`Therapeutae', were endeavouring by inner paths to purify
and develop their souls, to expel any elements cor-rupted
by outer concerns and external knowledge, in order
thereby to rise into the sphere of pure Spirit. An
offshoot of the sect of the Therapeutae, where this
subsidiary stream undenvent still further development,
was the community of the Essenes in Asia. All these men
in the sects both of the Therapeutae and the Essenes were
under a common spiritual guidance. A brief account of
them is contained in my book Christianity as Mystical
Fact.[ Note 03 ] To have any
exoteric knowledge of this spiritual guidance we must
remind ourselves of the lectures given last year on the
Gospel of St. Luke and published with that title. [
Note 04 ] Reference was there made
to the mystery of Gautama Buddha, the exoteric aspect of
which is also presented in oriental writings, and it was
said that one who is to attain Buddhahood in the course
of evolution must, to begin with, be a Bodhisattva, as in
the case of the Being known in history as the Buddha. He
too was a Bodhisattva until the twenty-ninth year of his
life as the son of King Suddhodana, and it was not until
then that through his inner development he rose to
Buddhahood. Many Bodhisattvas work in the course of the
evolution of humanity and the Bodhisattva who became
Buddha six hundred years before our era is one of those
who guide and direct evolution. An individuality who
rises from the rank of Bodhisattva to that of Buddha does
not again incarnate in a physical body on the Earth. From
the same lectures on the Gospel of St. Luke we have heard
how from the day of the birth of the Jesus of the Nathan
line of descent, the power of the Buddha radiated into
the etheric body of this child. And we heard that this is
not the same Jesus as the Jesus with whom the Gospel of
St. Matthew is primarily concerned.

An ancient
phase of evolution came to a conclusion svith this
attainment of Buddhahood by thc Bodhisattva, the son of
King Suddhodana. In point of fact, this phase of
evolution belonged to the same stream as that of the holy
Rishis of India; but it was brought to a certain
culmination when that Bodhisattva attained the rank of
Buddhahood.

When a
Bodhisattva becomes a Buddha, his successor takes his
place. This is also narrated in the old Indian legend
where it is said that in the spiritual realms, before
desccnding to his final birth, the Bodhisattva who was
born as the son of Suddhodana and then rose to
Buddhahood, handed to his successor the crown belonging
to the office of Bodhisattva. Thus since that time the
Bodhisattva who then became Gautama Buddha has been
succeeded by the new Bodhisattva who had a par-ticular
mission to fulfil in the history of mankind. The task
allotted to him was the spiritual guidance of the
movement represented in the doctrines of the Therapeutae
and Essenes and it was in these communities that his
influence worked. During the reign of King Alexander
Jannaeus (about 103 to 76 B.c.), a certain Individuality
was sent by this Bodhisattva into the communities of the
Essenes to be their guide and leader. This Individuality
— he is well-known in occultism and also in
exoteric Talmudist literature — was the leader of
the Essenes about a hundred years before the appearance
of Christ Jesus on the Earth. [ Note
05 ]

Thus a
hundred years before our era there lived a personality
who is not to be confused either with the Jesus of St.
Luke's Gospel or with the Jesus of St. Matthew's Gospel;
he was a leading figure in the Essene communities and is
known in occultism as a herald of Christianity among
them. He is also known in Talrnudist literature under the
name of Jesus, the son of Pandira, Jeschu ben Pandira. He
was a great and noble personality, about whom inferior
Jewish literature has woven all kinds of fables that have
been recently revived, and he must not be confused, as
some Talmudists have confused him, with the ‘Jesus
of Nazareth’ of whom we are speaking in these
lectures. This herald of Christianity among the Essenes
is known to us too as Jesus, the son of Pandira; we also
know that he was accused of blasphemy and heresy by those
to whom the teachings of the Essenes were anathema, and
after being stoned was hanged on a tree, in order to add
to the punishment the stigma of infamy. This is an occult
fact, also recorded in Talmudist literature.

In Jeschu
ben Pandira we have to see a personality stand-ing under
the guardianship of the present Bodhisattva. The facts
are therefore clear. — A stream, as it were
accessory to the main Christian stream, originated from
the Buddha's successor, from the present Bodhisattva who
later on will become the Maitreya Buddha and who sent his
emissary into the Essene communities, where in executing
his mission he achieved what we shall come to know in the
following lectures.

The name
‘Jesus’ is that of the Individuality of whom
the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke tell; but it was
also the name of that noble personality — regarding
whom everything contained in inferior Jewish literature
is calumny — who worked in the Essene community a
hundred years before our era, was accused of blasphemy
and heresy, stoned and finally hanged on a tree.

Notes:

1. See
Genesis. Secrets of the Bible Story of
Creation. Study of this cycle, particularly of
the first two lectures, is indispensable in
connection with the above passage.